Is Shakepay safe? Licences, account freezes and incidents
Is Shakepay safe?
Shakepay has 1 licence found in the register at securities-administrators.ca, issued by the CIRO. Its terms let it freeze, suspend or close an account, without prior notice. Its terms restrict unlawful or unlicensed gambling only. No primary-source incident is recorded, which is not proof of none.
Documents last checked Reviewed by CryptoGuardz Register Desk, editorial desk
Disclosure: CryptoGuardz has no commercial relationship with Shakepay and earns nothing if you open an account there. Every statement below is read from a document Shakepay publishes or from a public register, and each carries the date it was read. Corrections go to the corrections page.
Shakepay review: the documents
This is a review of the documents Shakepay publishes and of the registers that should list it, not a test of the platform: no account was funded and no withdrawal was run. The binding terms name Shakepay Inc. as the company you contract with, in Canada (federal corporation headquartered in Montreal, per the Customer Account Agreement). The record quotes 8 clauses across 6 topics, read 2026-10-09, from 10 sources. Shakepay has 1 licence found in the register at securities-administrators.ca, issued by the CIRO. 1 further licence it claims was not confirmed in any register. Its proof-of-reserves page could not be loaded, so that field is no data. The terms carry a clause on what happens to customer assets if the company fails, quoted below. Its terms restrict unlawful or unlicensed gambling only. 6 points could not be verified and are listed below.
Is my crypto safe on Shakepay?
Shakepay is a custodial exchange: coins on the account are held by the exchange, not by a key you control. What protects them is what the binding terms say about holding customer assets and about the company failing. One clause on holding customer assets is quoted below.
Your Funds are held in accounts segregated from Shakepay’s assetslegal.shakepay.com
Insolvency and bankruptcy language in the terms, verbatim:
In case of the insolvency and/or bankruptcy of Shakepay or our custodianslegal.shakepay.com
Can Shakepay freeze my account?
Yes, by its terms. The 2 clauses are quoted as written, followed by the 2 clauses on suspending withdrawals. Grounds named in the text: its own discretion, with no reason required.
suspend your Account (also called a “freeze”), terminate your Accountlegal.shakepay.com
Shakepay may, in its sole discretion and without prior notice or justification refuse to open an Accountlegal.shakepay.com
Shakepay reserves the right to suspend any transaction, withhold Funds or Crypto Assetslegal.shakepay.com
We may also hold a transfer from your Account indefinitely in accordance with other internal policieslegal.shakepay.com
Sending funds to a casino is a named trigger in a clause that restricts unlawful gambling:
any illegal gambling activitieslegal.shakepay.com
Has Shakepay been hacked or fined?
No hack, fine or regulator action was found for Shakepay from primary sources in this collection: no company disclosure, no court filing and no regulator notice. That is not proof that none happened. It is the absence of a search result, and a press report is not recorded here until a primary source confirms it.
Shakepay support and scams
The official domain in the record is shakepay.com. Type it yourself rather than following a link from an ad, a search result or a message, and reach support only from inside the account you signed in to there.
Real support never asks for a seed phrase or for remote access to your device. An exchange account is opened with a login, not a recovery phrase, so a request for one is a request for a wallet you hold elsewhere. A request to install a screen-sharing or remote-desktop app hands the caller your signed-in session. Either one ends the conversation.
If money has already gone, the next message offering to get it back is the commonest second loss. The FBI, the FTC, the CFTC and the UK FCA have each published warnings about it, quoted on crypto scam recovery: what is real.
What we could not verify
The gaps in this record, as the record states them. A point listed here was looked for and not confirmed; it is neither a finding for Shakepay nor against it.
- The FINTRAC money services business registration. The FINTRAC registry is disallowed by robots.txt.
- Shakepay Inc.'s federal corporation number. Not in the agreement; Corporations Canada not read.
- CIRO's own dealer member listing. ciro.ca/investors/choosing-investment-advisor/dealers-we-regulate returned a 404; CIRO membership is taken from the regulators' decision.
- Any proof of reserves. No page was retrieved.
- The identity of Shakepay's custodians. Not named in the agreement or in the parts of the decision read.
- Incidents. No regulator action, court filing or company post-mortem concerning Shakepay was retrieved. That is not a finding that none exists.